In this Jan. 28 file photo, Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter, right, speaks while College Athletes Players Association President Ramogi Huma listens during a news conference in Chicago. In a landmark ruling on Wednesday, a federal agency gave football players at Northwestern University the green light to unionize.
(AP/Paul Beaty)

If you heard today that Northwestern football players had cleared their first hurdle in forming a players’ union and you shook your head and grumbled that everything in college sports was now going to hell just like the pros, maybe you should consider this:

The very idea of college sports is not normal. No one else in the world has a system like we do. It’s looked at as wildly strange and nonsensical.

People in other countries survey our college sports landscape and say, “Huh? ... Why?” Why would high schools and especially universities take part in promoting and running athletic teams on the side as if they were businesses? How does that fit into any academic mission?

And if these college sports enterprises most certainly are businesses, then don’t the players necessarily have to be employees?

That’s what the regional office of the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago concluded in its ruling released Wednesday afternoon. And it’s merely what the rest of us knew all along even if we don’t want to admit it:

The only people clinging to the euphemism of “student athletes” as somehow amateur principals in a wildly lucrative professional system are the people trying to protect their businesses – the NCAA and their member universities and the television networks who supply the juice. If they don’t maintain this lie, they can’t continue banking all of the revenue produced.

No, college athletic departments are most definitely businesses. Like any other realm of the business world, some operations are failing, some are frantically treading water and some are churning out obscene amounts of cash routinely numbering eight figures annually.

And the athletes are paid zero in salary in each case. Their reward is an education which may or may not be worthy of the school’s name depending on how draconian is the coach lording over the athlete. If the athlete is given time to craft a genuine curriculum, he may exit the school with a degree usable in the real world. If he’s coerced into a pretend major full of middle-school-level courses designed simply to keep him eligible to participate in the business, then no, he won’t be employable except in possibly his chosen sport.

And that is the problem with American college sports in the first place: They should not exist on the Division I level at all. A college sport should be a club or extracurricular experience, not a business designed to rake in tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue.

No, the American college sports paradigm is the weird one. We just can’t think of it that way because it is so engrained into the fabric of our society. But college football and men’s college basketball – their massive stadia, arenas, television contracts and million-dollar coaches – are outliers.

The rest of the world works around a system much more like American baseball. If a middle school kid is good at a sport, he plays for what we would call a “travel team” with an athletic club. If he continues to progress, he might sign a pro contract even before he graduates high school. Rather than play in college, he might opt to play for money in the minor leagues as a teenager. Such a player, will progress all the way from his preteen years to adulthood without ever participating for a team based around a school.

That’s the way it works in all sports around the rest of the globe. And therein lies the problem with college “revenue sports” in this country and the shameless suits who run them: They want to earn Monopoly money like corporate executives. But they want their employees to call themselves amateurs. It’s outrageous.

In its quest to form a union, Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter and his group have not cited payment as a goal, although that certainly seems to be down the tracks. What they say they want is post-career medical care for any malady brought on by the violent game they play, independent monitors who can serve to judge whether, say, a concussion has been suffered without the fear of conflict of interest inherent in a school-employed trainer or physician.

They want assurance that they’re being looked out for, just like any employee would. I don’t think that’s an outrageous request. Wouldn’t you want the same for your son?

But the assumption of some – that this is not just a landmark decision but that we are inexorably destined for play-for-pay and unionization of all athletes – I think is way premature. This was only a first step and the process will be delayed and can be derailed at any of, at minimum, three or four important subsequent steps.

This was a regional NLRB director’s decision. Surely, a request for review by the national NLRB office in Washington will be filed. The board will compose a panel. Briefs will be invited. The board could then invite the Northwestern football players in to cast their ballots on forming a union.

Remember, NU is a private institution and this decision only will have direct ramifications immediately for such private schools as NU, Notre Dame, Wake Forest and Stanford, not big public schools such as Penn State.

If the NLRB approves, if the yeas win a vote for a union, then one could be certified. Let’s say that union comes to Northwestern officials and says, OK, we’re ready to bargain. The university will almost certainly refuse. Then we can then expect challenges in federal appeals court and ultimately the Supreme Court if the case makes it that far. It just might. Such a process could take a year or two.

But it might not get that far. And even if it does, who knows how much staying power this group of Northwestern athletes retains? That’s always been intrinsic in why college athletes have never organized before – they are always transient. Individually, each never sticks around longer than five years. As a group holding potential clout, even for shorter periods.

What if a few NU football players become weary of the process when they no longer have a dog in the fight? For sure, their opponents do – the well-compensated athletics directors and coaches and administrators who’ve made a living off the athletes’ sweat all these decades. They are sticking around. They will be entrenched.

Other athletes at other private schools may take up the fight. They will be encouraged to do so. If enough of them unionize, then maybe a threshold is reached where such schools’ revenue sports gain clout. If you can get health coverage for lasting conditions caused by your sport at a unionized private school, if you can get representation for grievances against an abusive coach, why would you risk playing at a public school without such protection?

But all that is way down the line. One side has a very tangible and lucrative system of revenue to protect. The other has only taken a first step toward challenging their power and still must prove their cohesion.